Comment 7 for bug 1715259

It's the nature of a binary distribution like Debian and Ubuntu that dynamically linked things pull in dependencies to provide those dynamic libraries even if you don't want them yourself. Removing the dependency would require a rebuild from source or a patch to the code that pulls it in to use dlopen(3) or similar instead. However that's not within the normal design scope of anything in our ecosystem, so I don't think it's realistic to expect that.

If you want a system that really doesn't dynamically link anything you don't want, then you want a distribution that is designed to be rebuilt from source by users, not Debian or Ubuntu.

Pulling in the dependency should be harmless apart from some small disk space usage. If it is not, then please file a bug with specifics about that.

Since there are no plans to fix this in Ubuntu because what you describe is a fundamental nature of a binary distribution's design, I'm marking this bug Won't Fix to make that clear.